CNCnetPDM OPC Classic Alarm & Events (A&E) for Siemens Sinumerik 840D controllers enables you to monitor active and acknowledged alarms and events from your machines by a remote PC.
This document describes setup and test of alarm & event monitoring from Sinumerik 840D controllers that use the OPC Classic A&E Interface. To find out which OPC standard is used by your device see: Detect OPC Standard.
To directly read alarms and events from machines with Sinumerik 840D controllers connected to CNCnetPDM with your applications you can use our free Open Source Client (C-Sharp)
FIG 1: Alarm output on a Sinumerik 840D controller
If you have installed CNCnetPDM on your PC with a license other than a ‘free license’ and run this program from the folder where CNCnetPDM is installed you can monitor ALL alarms & events output by your controller, otherwise only the first one. Please see licensing for details or contact us if you have any questions.
Note: If you like to run this program from a different location on your PC you can simply copy your CNCnetPDM.ini file to this directory.
CNCnetPDM OPC CLASSIC A&E CLIENT
The program enables you to connect to your controller via the OPC Classic A&E interface and monitor active and acknowledged alarms and events.
Download AEClient.zip and extract all files to a folder on your PC. Right click AEClient.exe with the shift key pressed and select ‘Run as different user’. Enter a dot ‘.’ and backslash ‘\’ followed by user name ‘auduser’ and its password.
In AEClient.exe enter the DNS Hostname or IP Address of your controller into the textbox right to [Connect] (1) followed by [Connect]. You now should be connected to the OPC Alarm & Events server on your controller.
FIG 4: Alarm & Events Client
If there are any active alarms on your controller the program outputs them in a list in the upper area of the dialog (2). The list contains:
Event Time: Date and time since when the event is active
Severity: Severity of the event (possible values 1 - 1000)
Source: Source of the event e.g. PLC or PARTPROGRAM
Condition: Alarm number of the event
State: State of the event. Active events show up in red with a red icon as ‘Enabled, Active, Not Acknowledged’. For acknowledged events you see a green icon with grey text ‘Enabled, Acknowledged’
Message: Text output by the OPC A&E Server associated with the alarm number (condition) of the event.
If you click on one of the events you can see its details in the lower area of the dialog (3).
If you right click on an event you can either delete this event or clear all events in the dialog. You can also acknowledge the event if permitted by the A&E Server.
Clicking on [Subscription] -> [Subscription State] enables you to deactivate/activate the current subscription, set a buffer time and a maximum size for messages from the A&E Server.
[Subscription] -> [Filer Settings] allows to select the event types that should be acquired and minimum/maximum values for severity of alarms and events that should be output.
If you deselect [Overwrite old notifications] in [Settings] acknowledged alarms are shown as separate entries in the list, otherwise active alarms are overwritten once acknowledged.
If you’re done, click on [Disconnect].
TROUBLESHOOTING
In case of errors the program outputs an error log file (Log + date.txt) that can be found in the directory where the program is located. This file contains detailed information about any errors.
If you see a popup window with ‘CoCreateInstanceEx: The RPC server is unavailable’ check that the controller is running, you typed in the correct IP Address and you configured your firewall correctly.
If the program outputs an error that contains: 'Interface not registered' make sure that you have the OPC core components installed.
If you shut down AEClient.exe via Task Manager or it crashes the process OPCSinumerikAlarm.exe at the controller keeps running and refuses any new connections. In this case you can either, if possible, terminate OPCSinumerikAlarm.exe directly at the controller or restart the controller.
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